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Conservatives owe NY-23 candidate Doug Hoffman immeasurable gratitude. He overcame impossible odds (single digits just a month ago) to come within two points of defeating Democrat Bill Owens. Hoffman had zero name recognition. National Republican Party officials dumped nearly $1 million into the race on behalf of radical leftist GOP candidate Dede Scozzafava, who then turned around, endorsed Owens and siphoned off 5 percent of the vote with her name still on the ballot after she dropped out.

Conservatives’ money went to pay for specious attack ads against Hoffman run by the NRCC like this.

Hoffman’s candidacy illuminated the stark difference between GOP political opportunists willing to pimp out their endorsements to any old ACORN-embracing, Working Families Party-consorting, Big Labor crony who puts an “R” by her name — and movement conservatives who refuse to “mooooderate” for the politically expedient sake of mooooderation as dictated by out-of-touch Beltway party leaders. The NRCC/RNC’s $1 million debacle will cost much more than that.

One thing is guaranteed at the conclusion of the NY-23 special congressional election: The Beltway Republicans who endorsed radical leftist Dede Scozzafava are going to have indelible egg stains on their faces. And GOP establishment fund-raising organizations will be the poorer for it.

Better a donkey in office that acts like a donkey than a donkey in elephant’s clothing making a complete ass of the GOP.

Moreover, NY-23 is a victory for conservatives who refuse to be marginalized in the public square by either the unhinged left or the establishment right. A humble accountant from upstate New York exposed the hypocrisy of GOP leaders trying to solicit funds from conservatives by lambasting Pelosi and the Dems’ support for high taxes, Big Labor, and bigger government — while using conservatives’ money to subsidize a high-taxing, Big Labor-pandering, bigger government radical. The repercussions will be felt well beyond NY-23’s borders. Conservatives’ disgust with the status quo has been heard and felt. They have been silent too long. They will be silent no more.

The GOP leadership knows it cannot afford to rest on its laurels, continue business as usual, and bask in yesterday’s electoral victories without confronting its abysmal abdication of principled conservative leadership in NY-23.

As Hoffman said in his concession speech, “This is only one fight in the battle.”

Here is one of the loudest messages of the 2009 off-off-year elections: Conservatives in America will no longer let their opponents define them out of the mainstream. They will not submit to Democrats. Or to the media. Or to Beltway Republican capitulationists. They will not “rebrand.” They will not sit down. They will not shut up.

Just this past weekend, Democrat Rep. Jim Moran attacked the Republican candidates for governor and attorney general in his state of Virginia as the “Taliban ticket.”

New York Times columnist Frank Rich decried the Right’s “Jacobins” and “Stalinists” who he said joined a “putsch” by supporting Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman over ACORN-embracing, Big Labor-promoting, pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage, tax-and-spend Republican Dede Scozzafava in New York’s 23rd congressional special election.

And senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett told ABC’s “This Week” that the grass-roots conservative-vs.-GOP leadership battle over NY-23 showed that the Republican Party leadership was “becoming more and more extreme, and more and more marginalized.”

Let’s talk “extreme.” Valerie Jarrett is the White House official who bragged openly about recruiting disgraced Marxist rabble-rouser Van Jones for the green jobs czar post. She lavished praise on his public career and said she had followed him “for as long as he’s been active out in Oakland.” In Oakland, Jones was working to dismantle California’s juvenile justice system, pitting minorities against police officers, and crusading to free Death Row cop-killer Mumia abu Jamal.

Who are you calling “extreme?”

Jarrett’s White House colleague Patrick Gaspard, Obama’s political director who intervened in the race to convince Scozzafava to endorse the Democrat candidate Bill Owens after she dropped out, was a top organizer at the militant Local 1199 chapter of the Service Employees International Union and an activist/organizer for the New Party and the Working Families Party – both ACORN/Democratic Socialist Association front groups.

Who are you calling “extreme?”

“It’s rather telling,” Jarrett sniffed, “when the Republican Party forces out a moderate Republican and it says, I think, a great deal about where the Republican Party leadership is right now.” It’s rather telling that the White House persists with this pointless marginalization strategy as Gallup polls show conservatives continuing to outnumber moderates and liberals across America.

It wasn’t merely that she favored higher government spending. But that she supported the stimulus that every single House Republican in office opposed, on top of her support for the union-expanding card-check bill, on top of her ambiguous statements on the energy tax-imposing cap-and-trade bill.

Newt Gingrich, who foolishly stood with Scozzafava until she threw herself under the bus over the weekend, piously invoked Reagan and condemned the extreme “purism” of unruly conservatives who wouldn’t keep quiet about Scozzafava’s radical Left agenda.

But conservatives are not demanding “purity.” They are simply abiding by Reagan’s own wise counsel in 1975: “A political party cannot be all things to all people. It must represent certain fundamental beliefs which must not be compromised to political expediency, or simply to swell its numbers.”

The Republican National Committee and National Republican Congressional Committee threw an estimated $900,000 down the toilet for a candidate whose core views and political alliances undermined conservatism’s fundamental beliefs in limited government from day one. It was a reckless expenditure of the GOP base’s hard-earned money and a bitter tuition bill for a teachable moment on the perils of political expediency.

The days when immoderate political operatives and feckless Beltway opportunists could define “moderation” by their own warped yardsticks without pushback are over.